It’s taken me a while to put this post together due to wanting a variety of examples (and I’m posting this whilst not hungry so all the better 😉 ). Basically I saw some vegan friendly veggie burgers in a supermarket on special offer back in the January sales and thought it’d be nice to have something different and that I hadn’t had in ages. They tasted similar to many others I’ve had over the years and weren’t anything unexpected but still, Mum was very disappointed and thought they were like cardboard and to me they just felt like mush, something to perhaps have with a plateful of other things to compensate. Not for the first time since I started focusing on preparing food from scratch I wondered why I’d ever bothered with them.

Anyway as usual when we don’t like something we (try to) do it ourselves.

The results

It’s big! That’s a dinner plate, not a small one.

A Chunky veggie burger, vegan friendly and easily made allergen friendly by using preferred flours etc.

It’s a very simple recipe – just veg of choice, flour of choice, abit of sea/Himalayan salt, just enough water to make it sticky or into a batter and a little oil of choice.

The amounts used depends on the size of your pan, how many you want to make and how thick you want them to be. We initially used:
500g of veg,
1tsp of salt,
just enough flour & water to make it sticky,
1 heaped tbs of chia.

Chia seeds are used for their nutritional value and gelatinous quality e.g. as an egg replacer; they literally open/turn inside out with the jelly surrounding the shell. However ground flaxseed/linseed is also a popular choice (1 tablespoon flaxseed/linseed plus 3 tablespoons water) although I find slippery elm a fine and much cheaper alternative. Plus it has the benefit of not sticking all over my mouth/teeth/gums like chia. That said we’ve found that this recipe doesn’t need egg replacers.

Heat enough oil to shallow fry, add some mixture and fry on high heat for upto 5min per side or just before it burns – the chunkier the burger the more heat it needs but it also depends on the strength of your cooker. Cooking it that way made 2 burgers but we decided that a little oil was needed within the mixture as well to ensure cooking all the way through and to improve taste, it also shortened cooking to 3min per side but others may prefer it with less oil.

We found that makes very chunky and filling burgers as pictured but if you make the mixture into a batter rather than just sticky you can make them thinner in the pan to get 3-4 burgers. You can also add tomato sauce, an alternative milk instead of water (which makes them creamier) and spice. I think this would really have benefited from fresh herbs as well such as coriander, parsley or dill – Mum says pesto lol.

The benefits of cooking them like this:

You control what goes in and don’t have to put up with cheapening filler and sometimes unnecessary formulation ingredients like rehydrated textured protein, methyl cellulose, yeast, dextrose, added gluten, hydrogenated or hydrolized ingredients.

It’s a very versatile method and we tried different bases like beans and fruit, yep fruit 🙂

Apple

This is apple and instead of salt we used 1 heaped tsp of demerara or molasses per apple and we found 1 apple made upto 2 burgers/fritters. More sugar can be used but we like them to be slightly tart tasting. The density of the fruit determines the texture of the outcome e.g. apples are harder and actually tasted like strudel whether we used water or a mix of water/milk but we also used pears and just milk and they tasted softer and more like pancakes.

I actually used organic unrefined argan oil in the mixture for this pear batch!

On the whole these are very filling, we could only eat 1.5 at most at a time!